Harvesting the sky

Thirsty Santa Fe catches on to catching rainwater

Santa Fe is considering a law requiring new buildings to
install rainwater-harvesting systems. Already, though, many
historic neighborhoods are catching the rain using innovative
methods. This compound of buildings has the potential to harvest
hundreds of gallons from cloudbursts

PHOTOS COURTESY EARTHWRIGHTS DESIGNS

Old-timers remember when the Santa Fe
River, which cuts through the middle of the city, ran year-round.
These days, the river —when it runs at all — is little
more than a trickle through a dry, sandy arroyo.

Santa Fe
and its 65,000 residents are dangerously close to outgrowing their
water supply. The city’s reservoirs on the Santa Fe River
above town provide about 40 percent of its water; the rest comes
from wells. Meanwhile, the local economy rests heavily on the
building industry, which adds some 400 to 800 homes annually.
Despite implementing strict water restrictions in the last decade,
adding four new city wells and planning for a water diversion
project from the Rio Grande River, the city estimates that it could
experience water shortages after 2015.

Many Western
cities face the bleak combination of rapid growth and a maxed-out
water budget. But Santa Fe is working on an innovative solution. If
Mayor David Coss gets his way, the city will adopt an unprecedented
ordinance requiring all new buildings to install
rainwater-harvesting systems. Long championed by green builders,
these systems funnel rainfall from rooftops into cisterns, where
it’s stored for later use. Some systems purify the captured
runoff for drinking and bathing, but most just use it to water
lawns and plants. A growing number of buildings use rainwater to
flush toilets.

“Rainwater harvesting puts water
right back into the system when it is used that way,” says
Paul Paryski, who co-wrote the ordinance currently being considered
by the city. “It puts it back into the treatment plant.
There’s a net increase in water in the system” because
rainwater that would otherwise be lost to evaporation is captured
and contained.

Using the captured water for irrigation or
toilets reserves treated city water for drinking or bathing. An
inch of rain falling on a 1,000-square-foot roof can add up to more
than 500 gallons of stored water. In Santa Fe, where it rains about
15 inches a year, that amounts to 7,000 gallons per home. If most
of the town’s buildings had such systems, almost 2,000 acre
feet each year — about 20 percent of the city’s total
water use — could be collected.

New Mexico water
managers encourage rainwater harvesting. But upstream, in Colorado,
using rainwater in this way is illegal, and punishable by a fine of
up to $500 per day. “Rainwater harvesting interferes with
water rights,” explains Marta Ahrens, public information
officer for the Colorado Office of the State Engineer. “Even
if that person puts that water back into the groundwater system,
the problem is that it is used first. (It) interferes with the
priority system.”

John Longworth, chief of the
Water Use and Conservation Bureau in the New Mexico Office of the
State Engineer, acknowledges that rainwater harvesting holds an
ambiguous place in the world of water law. “It’s a
tough place to be,” he says. “At this point,
we’re using this policy (encouraging rainwater harvesting) as
a common-sense approach. In New Mexico, these kinds of activities
have been going on for hundreds of years. If you’re not going
to be pulling water off of a roof, then you’re pulling it out
of a domestic well. It’s six in one, half dozen in
another.”

Other cities and states also encourage
the practice. Seattle has included systems on some of its municipal
buildings, Portland awards grants to fund projects incorporating it
and the state of Texas has passed incentives to promote rain
harvesting. Even the county surrounding Santa Fe requires new homes
over 2,500 square feet to include water harvesting systems. But if
the city of Santa Fe adopts the proposed ordinance requiring all
new buildings to capture rainwater, it would be the first
municipality to pass such a law.

Residents and builders
aren’t waiting for the ordinance, however. Many houses
already have elaborate catchment systems, and a 600-gallon cistern
sitting in a Santa Fe courtyard is not unusual. Even mainstream
developers are catching on. At Lena Street Lofts near downtown, a
live/work development under construction, rainwater running off the
roof will fill a 60,000-gallon cistern, providing about 80 percent
of the water needed for toilets. Homes at another development have
600- to 1,200-gallon systems for irrigation. And the Santa Fe
Railyard, which includes businesses, municipal buildings and
residences, will be linked to a 110,000-gallon rainwater-harvesting
system. Nearby, El Corazon, a new condominium community, waters
plants with rainwater stored in two 50,000-gallon holding tanks.

“It was the right thing to do,” says Rob
Harper, vice president of El Corazon developer Unity Hunt Inc. And
it also helps the bottom line. In 2002, the city began requiring
developers to either buy water rights and transfer them to the
city, or pay to convert standard toilets in homes around the city
to the low-flow variety to make up for water they use. El Corazon,
built on the site of an old apartment building, elected to conserve
water with a combination of low-flow toilets and showerheads
combined with rainwater harvesting. Harper explains that they were
able to use 20 to 25 percent less water than the old apartment
building and were therefore able to avoid paying the
toilet-retrofit fee.

But relying too much on the
“free” water that falls from the sky could be asking
for trouble, says Claudia Borchert, water resource coordinator for
the city of Santa Fe. “I’m all for trying to catch
rainwater,” she says. “The problem is, people still
want to have their green gardens even when it doesn’t
rain.” In Santa Fe, the annual 15 inches of precipitation
tends to come from quick cloudbursts separated by long periods
without rain. “Then it’s hot, and people are watering,
and it hasn’t rained in the last three weeks,” Borchert
says. “That’s the day you have to plan for, the peak
day. And it costs a lot.”

Cristina Opdahl, a former resident of Santa Fe,
now lives in a cistern-equipped home in rainy Fayetteville, West
Virginia. This story was funded by a grant from the
McCune Charitable Foundation.